


your hand forever's all i want

by nymja



Series: oh my god they were soulmates [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M for about 4 sentences of smut lol, Red String of Fate, Soulmates, semi spoilers for 8x6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 00:57:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18906253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymja/pseuds/nymja
Summary: The morning after had been fine--great, actually. She’d worn one of his old shirts, he made coffee and a terrible attempt at pancakes. He kissed her before she left, and for the first time in awhile he felt happy. Really fucking happy.But then she didn’t come by anymore. Didn’t answer his calls. Eventually, it kicked in: he’d been humped and dumped by his soulmate.Fuck.





	your hand forever's all i want

**Author's Note:**

> my first soulmate au!! 
> 
>  
> 
> **  
> **  
> [story playlist!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1bGNll6DCj7kahOX8q1hBE)  
> 

_He’s on his way to work, headphones in, when he hears shouting over the Black Flag in his ears._  

_“I’ll kill you!”_

_“Piss head!”_

_Gendry doesn’t think much of it at first. Fights in his neighborhood aren’t uncommon, and he hasn’t heard any gunshots or anything like that. But then the yelling keeps going, and the fact that it sounds like kids makes him pause. Gendry pulls a headphone off his ear, walking toward the sound._

_A little kid in an oversized sweatshirt with the hood up is going pretty feral at a fat boy who looks older. On the ground is a backpack, its contents spilled out._

_Gendry scowls, tossing his cigarette and crushing it under his boot. Then he starts going down the alley, rolling up his sleeves in case it comes to that._

_“Hey!” He barks._

_His voice seems to startle them, both stopping their fight and turning._

_Gendry steps closer, eyeing the bigger kid. He’s never had much patience for bullies.The smaller boy is looking at both of them, and for some reason he thinks of a dog about to bite._

_“You like picking on little ones?”_

_He knows he’s big. His height and build got him into more than one fight growing up, everyone thinking they had something to prove and thinking they could do it by scrapping with him._

_The fat kid looks up, eyes wide._

_Gendry raises his brows._

_The kid looks down. “Didn’t mean it,” he says quickly._

_The little one grabs his opposite arm. “Did too,” he grumbles sourly._

_“Well cut the shit.” He crouches down, holds out the backpack to the small boy. “Here.”_

_He reaches out, grabbing it quickly. “Didn’t need your help.”_

_“Got it anyway, didn’t you?”_

_Gendry can’t see much of the kid’s face, but it’s enough to know they’re scowling. He sighs, glancing over them. “You done?”_

_The fighting pair stare at each other._

_“Yeah,” says the fat kid.  
_ _"Fine,” says the shorter one._

_“Get to school.”_

_The big one leaves as soon as he can. But the smaller one stays, eyeing him._

_“What?” Gendry asks._

_“I’m not going to school,” he says. His voice isn’t that deep, and so Gendry takes him for a_ little _little kid._

_“Why not?”_

_“Don’t want to.”_

_“That’s not a good reason.”_

_“Are_ you _going to school?”_

_He feels his ears get hot at the question. “Why’s what I do important?”_

_The kid looks up, and he can see their face a bit better: big, grey eyes; upturned chin. There’s a scrape on it, as if he fell down. “You don’t look old enough to not be at school.”_

_“I don’t go anymore.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“Got work.” He frowns. “How old are you, anyway?”_

_“Twelve.”_

_He does not look twelve. “Bit scrawny for a boy your age.”_

_“I’m a girl.”_

_He blinks, doing a once over. It’s hard to tell much with the sweatshirt. “Right, sorry.”_

_“It’s fine.” She pulls her hoodie down, and she’s got short, choppy brown hair. She eyes him critically. Then nods. “You’re alright.”_

_He snorts. “You too, I guess.” He nudges her with his shoulder. “C’mon, let’s go.”_

_“Go where?”_

_“School.”_

_She frowns, but follows him. He ends up being late for his job at the garage, getting an earful from Mott. But it’s alright. He makes a friend, then another once the big kid--Hot Pie--comes around._

_A red thread forms around his wrist, hair-thin. He can’t see it, but he feels it in the same way you can feel a spiderweb._

_It’s the day Gendry meets his soulmate, though he doesn’t know it at the time._

\--

Ten years later, Gendry wakes up. His arm’s numb, but when he turns and sees Arya’s mess of brown hair spilling over it he can’t find it in himself to mind. He knows he’s got a shit-eating grin on his face, but he can’t help it. Arya’s here, with him. In his bed. With him. Snoring. With him.

She moves. The blanket slips down her shoulder, revealing bare skin and she’s beautiful. She opens her eyes and lifts her head to look at him.

“Hey,” Arya says, as though this is just another morning. His heart jumps at that, his stupid brain thinking about every morning from now on being just like this one.

“Hey,” he says back, knowing he’s still smiling but not being able to do much about it. Gendry wiggles his fingers, feeling life come back into them with pins and needles. At the motion, the red string tied around his wrist moves.

He doesn’t know what to say. Neither does she, apparently. And so they just look at each other, and he brings his thumb to her cheek and runs it across her face. His heart’s thudding in his chest and he wonders if she feels it.

Eventually he clears his throat. “What do you want?” He finally asks.

Arya keeps staring , her grey eyes fixed on his face. “Coffee.”

Gendry pulls her into his chest, her head fitting under his chin. After a moment, her arms wrap around his waist and his cock seems to remember that they’re both naked, giving a small twitch. He’s torn between kissing her, running his hand down her bare side, or mentally reciting Flea Bottom street names in alphabetical order until it goes away.

She makes the decision for him when her hand drifts down, fingers dancing over his shaft and he sucks a breath through his teeth. Her hand wraps fully around him, giving an experimental pump. And it’s embarrassing how hard that makes him.

Arya snorts. “That didn’t take much.”

Gendry pulls back to glare at her, then decides he’d rather kiss her than say anything back. So he does, hand resting on her neck and tongue parting her lips. Her hand begins to set a slow, patient pace that is instantly _not_ working in his favor.

“Fuck,” he mutters against her lips. It takes a lot of effort just to avoid bucking into her palm like some dipshit teenager.

Arya’s hand comes to his shoulder, pushing him back. The red string around her own wrist sways and he doesn’t know how this all worked out for him. Gendry follows instructions, laying on his back.

“I’m going to try something,” she says with a lift of her eyebrow. “Tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”

He doesn’t think she can do anything wrong when she’s naked. His attention is firmly focused on her breasts when she pushes herself up into a sit. Arya laughs, as if she notices (she probably does, she notices _everything_ ), and he swallows because that’s one of his favorite sounds in the world.

Then she shifts down the bed, eyes watching his face carefully as she takes him into her mouth. His fists clench into the sheets and he swears to the Seven he fucking loses his vision.

\--

They have sex two more times before they make it out of bed. Last night was her first time, and he wanted to make sure he got it right for her. The memory of her thighs pressing against his ears and her hitched breaths as he ate her out is gonna be enough to fuel fantasies for years.

Neither of them have anywhere to go or anything to do, and so he throws on sweatpants and she throws on one of his older shirts, and they make their way to the kitchen. He watches, transfixed, as the hemline of it falls halfway down her thighs. He’s seen her in his shirts before, but it wasn’t the same now that he knew what was under it.

“Stupid,” she say, when she catches him watching. Then she opens his fridge and pulls out orange juice. She’s always drank it straight from the carton like some kind of animal.

He blinks, eyes darting up. “What?”

Arya wipes the back of her arm over her mouth, then puts the juice in the fridge. “Make coffee already.”

Gendry smiles a little at that, shaking his head as he starts to grab his can of shitty old Folgers out of a cupboard. “Whatever milady commands.”

“She also commands pancakes.”

So he tries to make those, too. They’re fucking terrible, all black on both sides and the smoke alarm goes off twice. He throws it all in the garbage before she can talk shit about them, and makes toast instead. The red string around his wrist is thicker than it's ever been, the cord that connects it to Arya’s bright and almost glowing.

He’s happy. He’s really fucking happy.

Eventually, she has to leave and he doesn’t want her to. But he knows if he said anything like that, she’d get pissed, and so he doesn’t. Instead he kisses her when she gets to the door, and once she’s gone he leans against the wall by it for awhile, stupid smile still on his face.

\--

_She’s sitting on one of his tool chests, and he sees her Converse-covered feet absently kicking out in the corner of his eye. The sound of an apple being chomped makes him roll his eyes up in annoyance._

_“Can’t wait to do that until I’m done?”_

_Arya shrugs. “Skipped breakfast.”_

_Gendry sighs, hands steady as he replaces a belt on a minivan. Once he’s done, he rolls out from the bottom, glaring at her as he grabs a rag off the floor. “Don’t you have better things to do on a Friday night then watch me work?”_

_“Not really.” She’s fourteen, all gangly limbs and fucking attitude. If it were anyone else, he’d think them a right little shit. But Gendry has never been able to think too bad of Arya._

_He runs the rag through the gaps in his fingers. As he does so, he stares at the thin string around his wrist. It’d just started becoming noticeable, although not much thicker than a regular thread. Truth be told, he hasn’t really thought about it much. If he’d met his soulmate, whoever that is, he figures he’d find out sooner or later._

_Gendry sets his rag down, and then for the first time, he notices one on Arya. A thin, barely there line of red around her left wrist. Seeing it bothers him, stirs up a protective instinct he’s always had toward her._

_“Aren’t you a little young for that?”_

_“For what?”_

_He lifts up his wrist._

_Arya looks down at her own, then rolls her eyes. “Oh. Whatever.”_

_“Whatever?”_

_“It’s annoying.” She looks up at the high lights of the garage. “The only people who care about that kind of stuff are people like Sansa.” Arya sends him a cool look, taking another bite of apple. “She started getting hers at_ eight, _by the way.”_

_He’s heard plenty about Sansa, and how well they didn’t get on. Half of him suspects that Arya hates anything Sansa cares about on principle._

_“Yeah, well.” He stands, going to log the hours he put into repairs on the van. “Be careful.”_

_“Careful of what?”_

_He clears his throat. “Just. Be careful.”_

_She’s really too young, he thinks again, eyes going back to the red line around her wrist._

\--

It’s astounding how fast he fucks it up.

They’ve been together a little less than week, and she’s stayed over twice since that first night. And Gendry doesn’t exactly know what they are, just that it feels good and he’s a bit dazed when he can do things like kiss her in public without her driving a fist into his stomach.

He’s walking her to the MMA gym where she works, arm slung over her shoulders and her wearing his beat up leather jacket that’s way too big for her, when his phone goes off. Gendry thinks to ignore it, but then it rings again. And again. And then he hears the chime for a voicemail.

“Just answer it,” Arya says, rolling her eyes as she stops.

Gendry frowns, but doesn’t protest. He doesn’t know the number, and doesn’t bother with the voicemail in favor of just calling it back.

 _“Hello?”_ Answers a posh accent he can’t place.

“Hey,” Gendry starts, “You called?”

A pause. “ _Gendry Waters?”_

“That’s me.”

“ _My name is Daenerys Targaryen, I’m handling your father’s estate-”_

Gendry blinks. He’s not educated, but he’s not an idiot, and he knows what it means if someone’s handling an estate. “He’s-?”

 _‘Left you a considerable amount of money,"_ she finishes. “ _As well as a family home in the Stormlands-”_

He doesn’t hear the rest of it, heart thudding almost painfully in his chest. It’s hard to breathe, let alone think-- snippets of thoughts filtering through his mind.

His dad, who he never even knew, was dead.  
He’s got a house.

He’s got-

_“Are you available to meet tomorrow?”_

“What?” He clears his throat. Dazed. Dazed is the only word he can think of. “I, uh. Yeah. That’s fine.”

She tells him some details he later won’t remember and will have to call her back for. But once she hangs up, he just stares at the phone in his hand. Throat feeling tight. He doesn’t know his dad, doesn’t know why _now_ he decided to give a fuck about him. He thinks it’s probably a huge fucking joke at his expense.

Gendry stares at the phone.

“Everything alright?” Arya asks, frown on her face.

Yes. No. _Yes._ The laugh that escapes his throat isn’t necessarily a happy one-- he’s probably in shock, he thinks.

“What’s going on?” Arya’s got a bit more of an edge in her tone.

Gendry looks at her, and on impulse he steps forward and kisses her. She’s startled, arms staying at her sides. He laughs again, nervous and a little panicked, pressing his forehead to hers.

“I’ll tell you about it later.”

Arya looks like she wants to fight him on it, but he watches as she smothers the impulse. “Alright.”

-

Two days later, they’re all celebrating Arya’s win against a high-profile fighter that went by the moniker Night King. She’s sore and a bit beat up, a butterfly bandage on the left side of her forehead. He’s careful of it when they sit next to each other at the bar, slinging his arm around her shoulders and kissing the right side of it instead.

He’s pretty smashed as the evening goes on, drinking because his heart won’t stop thrumming. His brain’s been running a mile an hour after that phone call--he’s got a house. He’ll have _savings_ for probably the first time in his life. And Gendry’s head is so wrapped up in this news, in what it means for him (and Arya, hopefully) that he doesn’t notice when she sneaks off, leaving him with her boxing coach who’s a bit of a dick.

“You seen Arya?” He asks, coming out of his daze.

Sandor glares at him over the rim of his mug. When it’s clear that Gendry’s going to stay until he answers, he snorts.

“You mean you don’t know?” He waves his wrist mockingly in front of both their eyes. Then sets it down to have another drink. “Fuckhead.”

And he’s got to be drunk. Because, well. Because that makes sense. “...Thanks.”

“Piss off.”

-

Gendry follows the red string that connects them until he comes across Arya throwing darts on the other side of the pub. He barely stops himself in time to avoid getting stabbed in the face and he hears Arya’s light laughter. Because that’s his favorite sound in the world, he walks up and kisses her. She smiles into it, arms pinned at her sides by his arms.

“My father died.” It’s not the most romantic start to what he’s about to do, but drunk him thinks she needs the full trajectory.

Arya looks up at him. “What?”

She must need a little more to go on, so he keeps his hands on her shoulders so she can Focus and he can Focus. “He left me--money, Arya! I’ve got-” he laughs, nervous again. “I’ve got a house now. Fully paid for, and it’s-”

Arya’s expression is softer than he thinks he’s ever seen it. Her eyes are wide, lips slightly parted until they form a small, genuine smile. “That’s fantastic.”

“We could live together, now.” He’s so drunk, his mind a flurry of thoughts and his heart is full of _so much_ he’s saying things he knows better to say. But they’re going, and he can’t stop his fool mouth. “You’re beautiful and I love you and marry me.”

He’s a little too drunk to kneel like he’s supposed to, but he gives it a go.

Arya just. _Stares_ at him for awhile, until his mouth feels dry. She’s fucking beautiful.

Eventually she bends down slightly, her hand on his back as she lifts him up and steadies him. Then, expression still soft, she stands on her tiptoes and kisses him. It lingers, and that has to be a yes, right? It’s got to be.

Arya takes a step back. “I’m not marrying anyone, Gendry.” He doesn’t understand what she’s saying at first. “That’s not me.”

She rolls her shoulders, expression carefully blank, and starts throwing darts again.

Gendry stands there, and eventually it settles in on him:

That wasn’t a yes.

\--

_They’re sitting on a blanket on a shoulder off a hillside road. Hot Pie had wanted to go look at some kind of meteor shower, and he and Arya were pulled along for the ride. They’d successfully nagged him into bringing whiskey, and so they’d spent the last hour or so taking pulls from it and snacking on the food Hot Pie’d made._

_Gendry’s whole life has been pretty shit, but it’s moments like these, with them, that makes it all alright._

_“Can’t even see anything,” Arya comments after they’ve been there long enough for half the whiskey to be gone._

_“Anywhere between 11pm and 3am,” Hot Pie reminds her for the third time. “It’s only 10:30pm.”_

_“Well, what’s it supposed to look like?”_

_“I don’t know! Never seen one before.”_

_“Then how do we know when it shows up?”_

_Gendry smiles, taking another drink from the bottle and listening to them bicker. Some days it’s fucking annoying, but he’s had a shit day at the shop, and the whiskey’s got him feeling warm and happy enough._

_His eyes drift over to Arya. She’s seventeen, and his eyes have been drifting over that way more and more lately. Nothing between them’s changed, really, except that when she smiles at him now he feels his ears get hot._

_“There! There it is!” Hot Pie exclaims, pointing up at the stars._

_It’s really underwhelming. Just a few, quick darts of white light. But Hot Pie’s excited about it, and when Arya leans back to rest her weight on her hands, one of her fingers goes over one of his and neither of them move it._

_Gendry looks at the red string winding around both their wrists, and for the first time he entertains a really foolish idea._

\--

She doesn’t answer any of his texts the next day. Or any of his calls after that. Even before they… even before then, she’d always stop by at either his place or the garage to give him shit or steal from his fridge. But after he hasn’t seen or heard from her in three days, he starts to get worried. So he goes by the gym, but she’s not training. He goes to Bella’s, but she’s not drinking.

Eventually, he caves and texts Jon. _u seen arya?_

Gendry watches as three little periods dance around the screen as Jon types. They dance for awhile, and it’s a full fifteen minutes before Gendry gets a message. 

_She took her bike and said she was leaving for awhile. Not sure where._

Gendry’s heart drops right into his fucking stomach.

Another text: _Don’t know when or if she’s coming back. Sorry mate._

Eventually, it kicks in: he’s been humped and dumped by his soulmate.

Fuck. _Fuck._

\--

_There’s something ugly brewing in his chest, but he can’t stop it._

_They’re at his half-sister’s bar, celebrating Arya’s eighteenth birthday and drinking pints. It’s a good crowd--what he’s come to think of as their people and her people in attendance. He hits it off with her brother Jon right away, the two getting into a friendly argument over football that her brother Robb eventually joins in on, too._

_He’d been apprehensive at meeting Arya’s family at first, knowing that her parents were Oldtown-educated and so was her eldest brother. Sansa had a successful career doing something in merchandising, and it wasn’t a secret that the Starks came from a long line of money. Gendry worried that he’d make a right ass of himself--he was a high school dropout, his hands permanently stained with engine oil and he wasn’t charismatic on the best of days._

_But Jon was more like him than he expected. A fellow bastard, and a little outside everyone else. There was something sad about him, even when he was laughing or telling him to fuck off because he supported the Stags over the Wolves. It’s not long before Gendry’s buying him, Robb, and Hot Pie pitchers. Robb’s friend Theon joins in when he sees there’s free beer. Gendry raises his brows a bit at seeing a thread linked between him and Arya’s sister--the pair of them seemed intent to ignore each other._

_It’s...going good. Surprisingly good. Beric and Thoros show up at some point, buying them more drinks. His whole body feels warm, and he wants to talk to Arya, to tell her the billion things he’s been thinking about and explain how he’s been wanting to kiss her for far longer than he’d like to admit, and that she’s beautiful and he doesn’t need tell her he loves her unless she’d be okay with it._

_Still sitting, because he’s not sure he can trust his legs to lift him up yet, he starts looking for her. When he finds Arya, that’s when that ugly thing starts winding itself up in him._

_She’s throwing darts, a blond guy next to her. He can’t hear what they’re talking about, only that the guy’s making big gestures with his arms and Arya’s smiling at him. She’s_ smiling _at him and Gendry’s heart lurches when this guy grabs her elbow and puts his hand between her shoulder blades to correct her stance-_

_Then he’s angry. He’s really fucking angry. At Arya, at this blond fuck she’s letting touch her. At himself. He knows he’s glaring, that he’s grabbing his glass too tightly. Were he sober, he’d tell himself to stop being such a fucking moron, but he’s not sober._

_Arya must feel his stare, because she smiles at him and he almost starts smiling back before she starts walking over with that shit. The smile dies for a frown, and he keeps his eyes on the guy. The intruder doesn’t notice, looking at Arya the same way he thinks he must look at her and he doesn’t get to do that. He doesn’t know Arya--that she likes to fix up motorcycles or that she fractured her shin at fifteen fighting or she scheduled an appointment to get a huge wolf tattoo on her bicep later that week for her dad._

_“This is Ned,” she introduces to the table._

_He notices that it’s only to_ their _side, that her family must already know him. Of course they do. Her face is flushed from drink and her eyes are bright and_ fuck _he’s really in love with her, how can she not know that?_

_“Still on break from school?” Sansa asks, more sober than any of them. Of course he goes to fucking school. Probably Oldtown like the rest of them._

_“Going back next week,”_ Ned _says. Uninvited, he takes a seat at their table on Sansa’s side._

_Arya hops in between Gendry and Hot Pie. It should make him feel better. It fucking doesn’t._

_And it only makes him feel worse when he sees Ned reach for a pitcher in the middle of the table. Around his wrist is a red string. Panic leaps up into Gendry’s throat, as he looks at Arya’s. They’re the same. They’re the same thickness and suddenly it’s hard for him to breathe._

_He doesn’t want to be there anymore. So he shoves his chair out, mutters something about a smoke, and heads for the exit as fast as he can. As soon as he’s outside, he stands against the brick wall of the building and hits the back of his head against it. Closes his eyes._

_Fuck._ Fuck.

_“What the hell was that about?”_

_He doesn’t want to talk to her. He just wants to sit out here until he can’t think anymore. Until he can’t see that Arya’s and Ned’s red strings are the same._

_“Go back inside,” he says with a scowl._

_“Don’t tell me what to do.”_

_“Ned’s probably wondering where you are." He can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice._

_Arya steps closer to him. And she’s really beautiful and her shorts are too short and he just wants to go back to his shithole apartment and keep drinking by himself until he can’t see straight._

_“Who cares.” Her eyebrows draw together. “What the hell’s your problem?”_

_“Nothing.”_

_“Bullshit.”_

_“Just leave it alone.”_

_“You’re ruining my birthday.”_

_And she knows him too well, because that gets him to shut up. Then drunkenly confess. “You think that’s the one, then?”_

_“The one what?”_

_“Ned. Your…” he can’t say it, so he just lifts up his arm, red string dangling._

_Arya snorts. “Ned’s not my soulmate.”_

_“You don’t know that.”_

_“Yeah, I do.”_

_Gendry feels that ugly thing starting to shift into something else. Something sadder that doesn’t make him feel any less like shit. “How?”_

_“I just do.” Arya stands next to him, her arm pressed against his. “You going to give me a cigarette or what?”_

_He looks down at her, a million and one things running through his mind. Finally, he brings out his pack and taps the bottom of it a few times against his palm before offering it to her._

_Arya raises her brows, before she takes one and borrows his lighter. Once she’s done, he takes one for himself._

_He thinks about Ned, people like the Starks. Thinks about how Arya fits into that world, but he probably doesn’t. And he feels like an idiot for thinking he could._

_They stand in silence, looking up at the sky._

_\--_

The place is too damn big. He doesn’t own much, and with Hot Pie and Davos’ help, he’s got all his stuff moved in less than two hours. They stay for awhile, sitting on the floor eating pizza and drinking beer.

“You doing okay, lad?” Davos says, and Gendry wonders why he’s asking until he realizes he’s gone through four beers already and has been staring at the wall for awhile.

“Yeah,” he lies. “I’m good.”

To his side, he sees Hot Pie mouth “dumped” to Davos, and he reaches out with his boot to kick him in the leg.

“The hell was that for!” Hot Pie cries, rubbing his shin.

Gendry’s eyes just narrow as he pops the tab of another beer.

But the damage is done, and he hates how Davos’s eyes go to his wrist. To the red band around it with a severed cord dangling off. Davos’s own is healthy, the string leading out the house to wherever his wife Marya is. He clears his throat.

“These things work themselves out,” he offers, looking slightly uncomfortable.

“He got drunk and proposed after they dated for a week,” Hot Pie clarifies, and Gods Gendry just might fucking kill one of his best friends tonight.

Davos winces. Then hands him another beer.

-

They leave, and it’s just him still sitting on the floor. The house is too big, and it doesn’t feel like his. The walls are covered with dead animal heads and all the furniture is made out of some kind of log. Gendry thinks of his shitty loft, that one morning where he got to wake up with her brown hair mussed up on his pillow.

Gendry looks down at his wrist, plucks half-heartedly at the threads around it. They’re still braided together, somehow.

This house is too big. And he’s a fucking idiot.

\--

_She’s nineteen when she first kisses him. He’d been helping her fix up an old White Horse model. He’d gotten the motorcycle for her birthday, bartering a couple dozen of labor hours to Mott in exchange for the rusted out bike. It’s been their project for a few months, now. She’d come over after she got off work at Waterdancing MMA, and he’d teach her how to make repairs because she insisted on doing it herself. Then, he’d bring her home in his beat to shit truck._

_And they’re the best afternoons of his life, but he can’t help but feel like he doesn’t deserve them. After that night at the bar, he’d been feeling the distance between them more and more. Increasingly aware that he lives in a one-room loft and can barely afford groceries despite working almost sixty hour weeks, because he was so in debt from his mom’s medical and funeral bills. That Arya’s been accepted to Braavos University, and she’s gonna go and she’s going to do much better things with her life than what they’re doing now._

_“I need the wrench.”_

_He kneels down, the red bandana halfway out his back pocket pooling on the floor. She’s plopped down in a sit next to him, legs and shorts covered in grease and oil, and it is not helping his concentration one bit._

_Gendry tilts his head, eyes narrowing on the part she’s working on. And he groans. “No you don’t.”_

_“Yes I do.”_

_“No, that’s the carburetor. The fuck are you doing to-?”_

_“What you told me!”_

_“That is_ not _what I told you-”_

_“It is!”_

_“Bullshit it is!” Without thinking, he grabs her wrist (he’s stopped looking at how thick the red string is these days. He doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to hope about things that aren’t going to happen) and moves it to follow his own gesturing. “_ This _is the carburetor,_ that’s _the pistons and--what’re you smirking at?”_

_Arya just sighs. “You’re so stupid.”_

_“I’m not the one using a wrench to-”_

_And she leans to the side. Her lips brush his and his whole body feels like it goes into electric shock. He’s not good with girls, never even talked to many aside from Arya, really. This is the first kiss he’s ever had that meant anything, and Arya’s hand is resting on his thigh and her lips are so soft and he can’t, he_ can’t.

_Gendry pulls away, even though it’s almost painful to do so. “Arya, I…” He doesn’t know how to finish the sentence._

_She stares at him, and he hates himself because she looks vulnerable and hurt. “Why not?”_

_He doesn’t know how to articulate what it is he’s feeling. That she could have better. That she_ has _better. “You’ve got a family,” he says. “I’ve never had any of that.”_

_“Then I could be your family.”_

_Gendry can only shake his head. She’s got a world ahead of her, and he’s got this same garage he’s been working out of since he was fourteen._

_And then he really hates himself, because now he sees the tears starting to well up in her eyes. But before he can say anything, do anything else, she’s gone and he loves her and hates himself too much to go after her._

_-_

_She picks up the bike sometime he’s not working, and he decides to take Beric up on his long standing offer to work for his shop across town._

_-_

_The day Arya leaves for Braavos, the red cord on Gendry’s wrist, the one that’s been inching closer and closer to hers without him realizing it, stops moving._

_And Gendry thinks maybe he just really fucked it all up._

_-_

_They don’t see each other again for three years._

\--

The string on his wrist stops moving like it did years ago, and after a few more months and ignored texts he decides there’s not much he can do about it.

So he does what he can to get his life together: he terminates the lease on his loft, puts in his two weeks’ notice to Beric so he can move to Storm’s End. Takes all the dead animals off the wall, and not sure where else to put them, lines them up in one of the six bedrooms the house has. With Robert Baratheon’s money he pays off his mom’s bills and finally clears out his debt. Then, with Davos’s help, he starts to look at garages of his own to buy. After two months, he’s got a start on his own shop.

He meets his uncle Stannis, who’s a bit of a prick, and his cousin Shireen, who he likes a lot.

And Gendry does his best to make a life for himself. If he keeps looking at his wrist to see if the thread starts to repair itself (it doesn’t), then that’s his business.

\--

_Arya’s dropped out of college, and no one knows where she is. He hears it from Hot Pie first, since the two of them still keep in contact, and he asked if he’d heard from her (he hasn’t). Gendry can’t make any sense of it until he catches it on Twitter. The Starks aren’t exactly page 6, but they’re a notable enough family to garner attention should anything major happens._

_Like the deaths of Catelyn and Robb Stark._

_He sits, glued to his phone as he scrolls through anything either of them have been tagged in. Eventually it all falls into place-- Catelyn, Robb, and Robb’s pregnant wife had been heading back from a wedding when they’d been hit by a drunk._

_Gendry calls her without even thinking about what he’d say. Just that he was there, and if she was okay, and-  
__and the phone’s no longer in service._  

_A year later, he hears about Rickon. And it’s then that he and Jon start talking again. Watching football games. Having a beer after work. If he had thought Jon sad before, he seems downright miserable now. When he tries to smile it’s like it gets caught halfway._

_“You hear from Arya?” Gendry asks, when he just can’t stop himself anymore. And if anyone’s heard from Arya, it’s Jon._

_And he can tell immediately it’s the wrong question to ask, because Jon seems to take a step back into himself when he says “No,” to the television._

-

 _He misses her._ _  
_ _And worries._

 _And it all feels like his fault, somehow, even though he knows that’s not true._  
  
\--

About a year after she leaves, he looks at the books Lommy’s been keeping for the shop. There's a White Horse scheduled for maintenance. The name of the model makes his mouth dry, but he files the paperwork and orders the part and makes himself get through the rest of the day.

\--

_Arya Stark walks back into his life when she’s twenty-two. And she’s different, older not just in appearance but in how she walks and talks. Her confidence._

_“I need this fixed,” is all she says, handing him a list of repairs she wrote up herself for her motorcycle (because of course she did)._

_“I’ve got other repairs-”_

_“I’ll wait.”_

_And then she finds a toolchest to sit on, like they’re teenagers again, and watches him work._

_“You’ve gotten better,” she comments._

_“Thanks, you too,” he says, not thinking._

_He knows without looking that she’s smirking at him, and he decides he’ll just have to die underneath this suburban._

_-_

_The red string on his wrist starts repairing itself. Hers does, too._

\--

“It’s a nice shop,” he hears from the doorway.

Gendry closes his eyes from where he sits bookkeeping. His back is to the door, but he knows who it is. He’d always know who it is.

He turns around. Her hair’s longer, now. Kept up in a bun that makes her look more like an adult. More like she’s got shit figured out. There’s more tattoos on her arms and legs, a piercing through her nose, and a red thread around her wrist that has a dangling cord the exact same length as his.

“Hi,” he says, because that’s all he can think of.

“Hello,” she replies.

Gendry’s pissed off, more than anything. But he knows that it’s a feeling he can table until later--because there’s going to be a later. If he has to run after a motorcycle, if only to yell at her until his entire face turns red, he’ll do it.

“Can I come in?”

He swallows. “Yeah.”

Arya leans against his desk, looking down at him. “Seem to be doing alright,” she says neutrally.

“I am,” he says, surprised that he means it. Because he is. For the first time, it really feels that way--even if alright meant lonely. “You look tired.”

“I am.”

Gendry tries to keep his heart anywhere but his sleeve, and he’s sure he’s failing. “You planning to stick around this time?”

“Yeah.”

Arya gives him a small smile.  
He gives her one back.

She stretches out her hand, resting her palm against his cheek. “I don’t want to get married.”

“Okay.” He exhales into it, then puts a hand on her hip. “I don’t want you to run off without a word again.”

“Alright.” She doesn’t have to lean down much, what with their heights, but she does seem to move forward until her lips hover over his. “I want to be able to travel when I want to. With or without you.”

He nods, his other hand sliding into her hair and messing up that careful bun. “I want you to move in with me.”

“I will.” Her fingers bunch into the front of his dirty shirt.

Effortlessly, he pulls her forward and lifts her up to sit on his lap. Arya puts her hands on his shoulders, and looks at him like he’s something new. When she kisses him, he decides this is the ending he wants, even after all their long roads.

-

The red around his wrist starts to tie back to hers.

**Author's Note:**

> first in a series :) plans for theon/sansa, dany/yara, and jon/ygritte in the future-- all set in the same universe


End file.
